The Maltese Falcon
Also called Dangerous Female
dir. Roy Del Ruth; writ. Maude Fulton, Brown Holmes, Lucien Hubbard; featuring Ricardo Cortez, Bebeaniels, Thelma ToddDaniels, Thelma Todd
dir. William Dieterle; writ. Brown Holmes; featuring Warren William, Bette Davis, Arthur; writ. Brown Holmes; featuring Warren William, Bette Davis, Arthur Treacher
dir./writ. John Huston; featuring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet
dir./writ. David Giler; featuring George Segal
The 1941 film noir masterpiece starring Humphrey Bogart, the classic detective movie everyone knows, was actually the third film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon and spawned one goofy sequel.
In 1931, the year
after the novel came out, Warner Brothers produced the first movie
version of The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade was played by Ricardo Cortez, who had started in silent
films and went on to have a long career that spanned over a hundred films,
including a stint as Perry Mason.
The femme fatale lead was played by Bebe Daniels who had an even longer career with nearly two hundred film credits. Screen siren Thelma Todd had a smaller role as Iva Archer, Spade's lover and wife of his murdered partner.
And watch for Dwight Frye, the versatile character actor of horror films including Frankenstein and Dracula, as the young gunman here.
The film, later renamed Dangerous Female, is surprisingly faithful to Hammett's novel and similar to the later more famous version—matching it almost scene for scene and in some cases, such in as the funny scene when the dapper little Dr. Cairo (Otto Matiesen, another veteran silent film actor in one of his last roles before being killed in an accident) confronts Spade at gunpoint, almost line for line.
But Cortez is all playboy as Spade, chasing after every skirt and with an eye out for the main chance—and continually laughing lasciviously, it seems. Until the end, of course, when he turns in the killer and suddenly turns solemn. But he does it without Hammett's speech about the code of loyalty. We never really get what motivates him to reach his surprising conclusion.
The sexual content however is much more explicit in this film than in the later versions, as the film was made before the studios' crackdown on immorality. It's clear Spade is sleeping around, we get to see much of Daniels in a bathtub, and the hoodlums are obviously homosexual.
As in most films of the era, the sound is terrible, requiring the actors to speak loudly and to overact. But the movies was successful at the box office and so, as was the fashion in those days, Warner Brothers set about redoing it.
